“For God’s sake,” interrupted David suddenly, “this is torture! Where did you see Ellinor? How is she?”
Madam Tutterville started, less at the words than at the tone. She stared a second blankly at the speaker, then meekly replied:
“I found her at Bath. She actually was no further than Bath! In a little lodging. She has been ill, poor dear, but now is strong again. Oh, poor child, she has suffered!”
David turned away. But the parson interposed eagerly:
“And was she alone? Has she told you all?”
Whereat Madam Tutterville was not a little irate.
“Alone, sir—what are you thinking of! I pray you remember, she is my own niece.” She checked herself. “Alone, yes, indeed save for the two dumb things, Belphegor and Barnaby. And as for telling me.... What do you take me for? Do you suppose I should be plaguing her with questions at such a moment? And it’s my belief,” asserted Aunt Sophia energetically, “that she’ll never tell anyone anything. When I as much as hinted again that she might confide in my bosom, she closed her lips and neither man nor mortal could have drawn a word from her; no, not if they had put her on the rack!”
“Singular,” mused the parson. But there was a latent illumination in his eye.
After a while, which was a long while to the impatience of her two hearers, Madam Tutterville had told all she had to tell:
She had traced Ellinor, “in a luminous fashion,” she averred; first by the sight of the unmistakable Belphegor washing his face on the window ledge of a quiet little grey house in a quiet little back street up which Providence (as she piously expressed it), in the shape of a stupid chairman, had inadvertently led her. So struck was she at the remarkable resemblance to her old cat-acquaintance, she noted in the four-legged philosopher seated among certain dead geraniums, that she had, upon an impulse, arrested her progress. And here (as she took some trouble to point to her spouse) her intelligence had given that effective aid to the designs of Providence, without which the Heavenly Hints would have been thrown away. No sooner had she called a halt than Barnaby himself appeared on the doorstep with a basket on his arm. And after that it was but a short way from the chair to the poor room: and Ellinor was gathered to her arms!